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“... boys’, however overwrought the language, he spoke a rhetorical truth. The applause that rose spontaneously from the crowds outside and was first heard inside the abbey like the pattering of rain was taken up by the congregation like a cathartic sigh. The danger passed. Nobody tried to shoot Charles and nobody, despite the rumours, threw bread rolls ...”

“... School of Art, was sent out under the name Jacob Morrow: romantic thrillers with titles like Rose of Rubies (serialised in the Portsmouth News), Here Is Murder, The Black Scarab. In December 1929, Jacob Morrow won fourth prize in a short-story competition run by the Hampshire Telegraph. Soon afterwards, she began to sign her work O.M. Manning, but it was ...”

“... led to cost over-runs that pushed Koons to the point of bankruptcy. But when his auction prices rose sharply, one of his dealers, Jeffrey Deitch, was able to assemble a consortium of gallery owners and patrons to buy some of the pieces in advance, sight unseen. (It turned out to be a smart investment: in 2007, one such work, Hanging Heart ...”

“... walls, as in a Wren City church, were juxtaposed with piers cased in timber at the base which then rose into arches without capitals in between – all most irregular. It took years to furnish St Agnes with the wealth of screens and fittings Scott wanted. All Hallows never got that far before funds ran dry. It is often said that the late Victorian ...”

“... her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and self-absorbed as usual, was beheading a litter of puppies with unexpectedly muscular and adult twists of her slender arms. Her cap of golden hair shone like burnished auburn on ...”

“... were moved, erected and – at first – exorcised and capped with crosses. Statues of Saints Peter and Paul crowned the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Great palaces and spectacular churches rose to serve as stages for the city’s magnificent religious and political pageants. Kircher actively helped his adopted ...”

“... history-aware viewer who registers also the dragon-vanquishing knight-cum-king, the fair English rose he’s redeeming, and the notional ‘poor folk’ who look on in hope of salvation, sharing the foreground with a hideous slough of dragon-chewed corpses. This heartfelt conservative fantasia was painted in the early 1630s. Charles’s grapples with the ...”

“... murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where Eco’s plot turns on a secret copy of a lost book, Binet’s this time revolves around a lost cycle of paintings. Another obvious precursor ...”

“... soon followed, to restore Ferdinand VII’s absolute rule, and the allies stood by when the Greeks rose up against their Ottoman rulers. By the time of the 1848 revolutions, ‘holy alliance’ had become an all-purpose signifier for a reactionary cabal. When Marx and Engels searched for a term to describe the enemies of communism, they naturally invented a ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals that Blair frequently pledged to ‘do ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... axis of experience, if only one of several made available by verse. To set Sleeping rough beside Peter Robinson’s latest recension, This Other Life, is to recover a sense of the depths which belong to places which exist then as well as there. Robinson’s fidelity to life’s temporal infrastructure, its recessive inward distancings, is apparent in the ...”

“... affected Carstairs more than any other private loss.Elsewhere Summerscale compares Carstairs to Peter Pan, finding in her yearning for a secret hideaway and her dream of perpetual boyishness – she exercised fiercely all her life to ‘ward off womanliness’ – an affinity with Barrie’s perpetual boy:As Wadley was an image of her soul, Whale Cay was ...”

“... yet. In 1756 a copy fetched £3 3s., 105 loaves; over the following decade the usual cost rose to more like that of 200 loaves; and by the 1790s the average price of a First Folio had risen to about £35, the equivalent of nearly 900 loaves. By the middle of the 19th century, though the Consumer Price Index had fallen (and the price of a loaf had ...”

“... but it was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that ...”